Introduction

The UAF Geophysical Institute Permafrost Lab studies frozen soil and the changes it experiences due to the warming climate. The study includes measuring temperatures at different depths below the surface. Measurements are made with a 1.5 meters long thermistor probes installed in the ground or with thermistor strings or proprietary temperature sensors that are immersed into bore holes up to 90 meters deep. For the measurements, the Permafrost Lab currently uses CR10X [1] and CR1000 [2], both made by Campbell Scientific, Inc. and Onset Computer Corporation’s Hobo U12-series [3], [4] and UX120-006 [5] dataloggers. Scientists at the Permafrost Lab require the loggers to possess certain qualities with respect to the number of channels, temperature measurement performance, memory capacity, and battery life, as well as overall dimensions, weight, and waterproofness of the enclosure. The research on the commercially available dataloggers, including the above-mentioned ones, showed that there is no single logger on the market that will meet all the requirements posed by the Permafrost Lab scientists. This motivation drove the need to develop a new data logger, which could resolve small changes in temperature, was accurate, inexpensive, small, and had enough memory capacity and battery life to sustain through the long logging sessions. The prototype of such data logger has been developed and is presented below.

Objectives

The objective of this work was to design, implement, and test the prototype of a multi-channel outdoor data logger with wireless capability (the Logger). The Logger had to meet the requirements posed by the Permafrost Lab, however it had to be adaptable so that it could be used by any researcher. The designed Logger had to have the following features:

The Overview of the Designed Logger

Overview of the Results

Future work

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Video

Acknowledgements

References